Why Intel keeps picking up those fights they have no chance to win? With their business model and mentality, I don't see how Intel stands any chance in this business. At least they should bring AMD on board to attack this market together. No customers, unless unavoidable, are willing to lock themselves into single source situation. Soda machine certainly doesn't require Intel high performance CPU to calculate how much customer should pay for one can of Soda.

I think the name intelligent systems is a bit misleading. This initiative seems more like a security features focus not ai as the title implies.
I haven't read release notes though so perhaps you have omitted the details that would back up such a naming.

Intel lost the embedded war years ago in two fell swoops. First the 80186/8 was badly crippled for speed. Competitive devices were 2 - 10 times faster. Second they stopped making it (and didn't offer a replacement). Add to that, their vast experience in the PC world where product lifecycles are 1 - 2 years, makes them wholly unsuited to understand the embedded world where product life cycles are measured in decades!
Unless, of course you define the embedded world as cell phones and tablets, which are a significant factor by installed CPUs, but rather fringe by number of development starts.
I presently have about 10 embedded products in the marketplace running the DSTni series of high integration CPUs, which are what the 186 should have been. One processes ethernet packets at 1000 per second!
Middleware is an attempt to turn dummies into programmers. But it has a cost. Every layer between the application and the hardware eats CPU cycles. In the embedded world that is not a good thing. Starting from simple, industry standard protocols, such as RS-232, SPI, Ethernet, it is quite easy to build message handling code directly on top of them that is optimized for the application. If interoperability is necessary, add TCP or ModBus or one of a number of standardized protocols.
Good luck Intel. You aren't speaking to my world.
Wilton Helm
Embedded System Resources

When a soda machine can utilize what is essentially a full PC, you know that the world is changing.
I can understand why Intel is doing this. While I don't see ARM as a world-ending threat to the full PC business, there is and will certainly be a lot of erosion on the low end. This is simply an offensive move into the big-ARM space.

A problem for embedded devices like processors or memory (and their makers trying to move into embedded) is they are not allowed to "stand out" - it's the performance of the system (on the chip or in the package) that counts.